#3 • Jade Zammit — Visual Artist • Photos by Bernard Gatt • Location: St. Paul's Bay, Malta
Across the Medium is Stradalia's series of quiet stories shot with artists and makers — short photo essays paired with a brief write-up.
It’s November, though the heat suggests otherwise. Sunlight falls directly through the entrance to Jade’s studio and lands on our backs as we step inside. The room opens into a working space full of pieces in motion: stretched canvases, stitched fragments, painted papers, figure sketches, loose threads, and bold chromatic swatches that seem to glow in the warmth.
Jade often begins without sketches. An idea arrives quickly and she starts before it fully forms. As she works, the image shifts and expands, sometimes growing beyond its first borders until smaller parts are stitched together into something larger. A piece feels complete when she no longer feels the pull to extend it.
Her practice draws from early memories. She learned cross-stitch with her cousins and grew up in a home where making things was encouraged. These beginnings now sit within her paintings and tapestry work. The surfaces carry gesture and texture but also a quiet nostalgia, a blend of inherited skills meeting the present moment.
She rarely stays still. While paint dries on one canvas, she moves to another. Two or three pieces often develop at once. The rhythm can be energising, and at times disruptive, but it suits her impatience and expressive approach. Excess paint on the palette is never wasted. It finds its way onto paper or another waiting surface as an idea forms.
Her work shifts between abstraction and narrative. Some pieces begin from movement, material, or the feeling of being in the room. Others come from conversations, emotions, or layered memories that drift into focus over time. Themes surface gradually and change form as they do, guided less by fixed symbols and more by instinct.
Light plays a clear role. On hot days she retreats deeper into the studio, stitching or drawing in the shade. In winter she gravitates toward the entrance, letting the sun warm the space while she works on larger canvases. She often pauses to watch the shifting patterns of light move across the surfaces she’s building.
Physicality sits at the centre of her practice. Large works require movement, climbing, assembling and reassembling. Working in segments means each part is made at a different moment. Some develop over days, others over weeks or longer, each carrying the energy or mood of its time. When the fragments are finally joined, the surface becomes a record of those shifts. Nothing stays fixed. Gestures change, memories blur or sharpen, and the final piece holds all of it—a physical trace of time moving through the body.
